For Immediate Release
21 January 2008

Energy Department Awards PPPL Scientist Two Million Hours
of Supercomputing Time to Advance Scientific Research Project

Tang heads one of 55 scientific projects recently awarded a total of 265 million hours by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. Announced January 17, the awards are made through the 2008 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), a DOE program that supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects.

"The Department of Energy's Office of Science has two of the top ten most powerful supercomputers, and using them through the INCITE program is having a transformational effect on America's scientific and economic competitiveness," DOE Under Secretary for Science Raymond L. Orbach said. "Once considered the domain of only small groups of researchers, supercomputers today are tools for discovery, driving scientific advancement across a wide range of disciplines. We're proud to provide these resources to help researchers advance scientific knowledge and understanding and thereby to provide insight into major scientific and industrial issues."

Tang's project focuses on gaining a better understanding of turbulence as a primary mechanism by which particles and energy diffuse across the confining magnetic field in toroidal fusion systems. Results from these studies may have direct relevance to the future performance of the international fusion experiment called ITER being planned for construction in France. Plasma is a hot, gaseous state of matter used as the fuel to produce fusion energy — the power source of the sun and the stars. This INCITE project will commence within the next month and extend over a year, with expected renewals in the subsequent two years.

Tang said, "My colleagues and I are grateful for the INCITE award and are excited by the opportunity to use the new IBM Blue Gene/P at Argonne National Laboratory to accelerate the pace to fresh scientific insights about the complex nature of turbulence in hot thermonuclear plasmas."

Co-investigators with Tang and Ethier on this INCITE project are Scott Klasky of DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Mark Adams of Columbia University in New York. Also, Tang said that Hal Finkel, a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow (CSGF) from Yale University, will be joining this effort for three months this summer to carry out his CSGF practicum project at PPPL.

In addition to his role at PPPL, Tang is Associate Director for the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, which was recently established at Princeton University to stimulate progress in innovative computational science via interdisciplinary alliances involving computer science, applied mathematics, and prominent applications areas in the physical sciences and engineering disciplines. Tang played a prominent leadership role for the DOE's development of its multi-disciplinary program in advanced computational science, SciDAC [Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing] and chaired the SciDAC 2007 Conference in Denver.

The 2008 INCITE projects were awarded time at DOE's Leadership Computing Facilities at ORNL and Argonne Laboratory, as well as at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, and the Molecular Science Computing Facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. Of the 31 new projects and 24 renewal projects selected, eight are from industry, 17 from universities, and 20 from DOE labs as well as other public, private and international researchers. Including Tang's project, Argonne will be hosting 20 INCITE projects this year on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. To read about all the 2008 INCITE awards, go to the DOE Office of Science home page at: http://www.science.doe.gov.